SunPCi™ Supporting Highly Available PC Applications with Solaris™ By Don DeVitt - Enterprise Engineering Sun BluePrints™ OnLine - August 1999 http://www.sun.com/blueprints Sun Microsystems, Inc. 901 San Antonio Road Palo Alto, CA 94303 USA 650 960-1300 fax 650 969-9131 Part No.: 806-4636-10 Revision 01, August 1999 Copyright 1999 Sun Microsystems, Inc. 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, California 94303 U.S.A. All rights reserved. This product or document is protected by copyright and distributed under licenses restricting its use, copying, distribution, and decompilation. No part of this product or document may be reproduced in any form by any means without prior written authorization of Sun and its licensors, if any. Third-party software, including font technology, is copyrighted and licensed from Sun suppliers. Parts of the product may be derived from Berkeley BSD systems, licensed from the University of California. UNIX is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, The Network Is The Computer, Solaris PC NetLink, SunPCi, Solstice, Sun BluePrints and Solaris are trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. The OPEN LOOK and Sun™ Graphical User Interface was developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. for its users and licensees. Sun acknowledges the pioneering efforts of Xerox in researching and developing the concept of visual or graphical user interfaces for the computer industry. Sun holds a non-exclusive license from Xerox to the Xerox Graphical User Interface, which license also covers Sun’s licensees who implement OPEN LOOK GUIs and otherwise comply with Sun’s written license agreements. RESTRICTED RIGHTS: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. Government is subject to restrictions of FAR 52.227-14(g)(2)(6/87) and FAR 52.227-19(6/87), or DFAR 252.227-7015(b)(6/95) and DFAR 227.7202-3(a). DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED CONDITIONS, REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON- INFRINGEMENT, ARE DISCLAIMED, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH DISCLAIMERS ARE HELD TO BE LEGALLY INVALID. Copyright 1999 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, Californie 94303 Etats-Unis. Tous droits réservés. Ce produit ou document est protégé par un copyright et distribué avec des licences qui en restreignent l’utilisation, la copie, la distribution, et la décompilation. Aucune partie de ce produit ou document ne peut être reproduite sous aucune forme, par quelque moyen que ce soit, sans l’autorisation préalable et écrite de Sun et de ses bailleurs de licence, s’il y en a. Le logiciel détenu par des tiers, et qui comprend la technologie relative aux polices de caractères, est protégé par un copyright et licencié par des fournisseurs de Sun. Des parties de ce produit pourront être dérivées des systèmes Berkeley BSD licenciés par l’Université de Californie. UNIX est une marque déposée aux Etats-Unis et dans d’autres pays et licenciée exclusivement par X/Open Company, Ltd. Sun, Sun Microsystems, le logo Sun, The Network Is The Computer, Solaris PC NetLink, SunPCi, Solstice, Sun BluePrints, et Solaris sont des marques de fabrique ou des marques déposées, ou marques de service, de Sun Microsystems, Inc. aux Etats-Unis et dans d’autres pays. Toutes les marques SPARC sont utilisées sous licence et sont des marques de fabrique ou des marques déposées de SPARC International, Inc. aux Etats- Unis et dans d’autres pays. Les produits portant les marques SPARC sont basés sur une architecture développée par Sun Microsystems, Inc. L’interface d’utilisation graphique OPEN LOOK et Sun™ a été développée par Sun Microsystems, Inc. pour ses utilisateurs et licenciés. Sun reconnaît les efforts de pionniers de Xerox pour la recherche et le développement du concept des interfaces d’utilisation visuelle ou graphique pour l’industrie de l’informatique. Sun détient une licence non exclusive de Xerox sur l’interface d’utilisation graphique Xerox, cette licence couvrant également les licenciés de Sun qui mettent en place l’interface d’utilisation graphique OPEN LOOK et qui en outre se conforment aux licences écrites de Sun. CETTE PUBLICATION EST FOURNIE "EN L’ETAT" ET AUCUNE GARANTIE, EXPRESSE OU IMPLICITE, N’EST ACCORDEE, Y COMPRIS DES GARANTIES CONCERNANT LA VALEUR MARCHANDE, L’APTITUDE DE LA PUBLICATION A REPONDRE A UNE UTILISATION PARTICULIERE, OU LE FAIT QU’ELLE NE SOIT PAS CONTREFAISANTE DE PRODUIT DE TIERS. CE DENI DE GARANTIE NE S’APPLIQUERAIT PAS, DANS LA MESURE OU IL SERAIT TENU JURIDIQUEMENT NUL ET NON AVENU. Please Recycle Sun PCi™ Supporting Highly Available PC Applications with Solaris ™ In the last installment of these articles, we looked at tips and techniques you might find useful when migrating to a Solaris™ PC NetLink system. In this installment, we will focus on creating a highly available environment for supporting PC applications, using the newly introduced SunPCi card. While we will focus on high available PC applications, we will also look at how the SunPCi product can solve both hardware and software compatibility and functionality problems between PCs and the Solaris Operating Environment. While the current SunPCi card is not designed to offer a scalable solution for a community of users (it supports one user at a time), its versatility makes it a tool that can provide many solutions for problems that PC server consolidations can generate. The quest to reduce the number of systems in data centers, while increasing reliability and availability, has led customers to consolidating to more scalable and reliable servers. As the customer’s transition from Windows NT based PCs to more scalable Solaris (SPARC™ Platform Edition) systems proceeds, support is often needed for PC-related devices and software. Sometimes, a single nagging hardware compatibility issue can force the data center manager to keep an older server around, consuming valuable real estate and system management cycles. Alternately a wintel based application or conversion tool might be needed to support some part of the consolidation process itself. In contrast, the Solaris PC NetLink product offers full compatibility in the areas of network services, but it doesn't support devices that require 100 percent Wintel drivers and I/O ports found only on PCs. The SunPCi card offers an excellent cost and space savings alternative to PCs when users are primarily using SPARC PCI-based workstations. The default configuration of the SunPCi software is a conservative configuration. It is not optimized to give the best performance, nor is it friendly to nightly backup procedures. Later in this article (See “Recommendations for Using Drives Within SunPCi” below) a optimized configuration is offered. 1 What is the SunPCi Card? The SunPCi card offers a complete PC hardware environment on your PCI-based SPARC system running the Solaris Operating Environment. It is a real PC on a PC card. All chip level functionality available on a PC motherboard exists on the SunPCi card. With the card, you can install and run either the Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 Workstation operating systems, and any of the thousands of productivity applications on your workstation, along side your Solaris applications. In addition, the 100 percent compatible parallel, serial, and USB ports make Solaris systems compatible with thousands of low-cost devices that use these ports on PCs. For a full description of the SunPCi card see http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/. Because the SunPCi card uses the Solaris Operating Environment for much of it's standard I/O, it can actually support PC applications more reliably. Its ability to support hardware interfaces at a 100 percent level of compatibility extends the functionality of applications that run on the card. The SunPCi card supports Wintel applications using retail versions of Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems. While nothing can improve the stability and reliability of these operating systems beyond their current state, the SunPCi card has several features that allow you to recover from OS/application problems much faster than on real PCs. SunPCi Hardware Background Sun has been shipping co-processor, X86 based products for years in the form of SBus and VME cards for older Sun™ systems. In contrast to the previous products, the SunPCi card is a not only a PCI card, as the name implies, but it has added hardware that makes the card 100 percent compatible with the PC’s serial, parallel, and USB ports, as well as sound interconnections, a 300Mhz AMD K6-2 processor, and up to 256 megabytes of private memory. These features make the card capable of supporting virtually every Wintel application and almost every low cost device available in the PC market. SunPCi Hardware Solutions ■ The parallel port has been used by hardware vendors for everything from ZIP drives to scanners, in addition to the printers the port was originally designed to support. While many SPARC systems have parallel ports, a lack of application and driver support has made it difficult to take advantage of these devices. Because the parallel port is designed into the PCI card itself, the software running on the SunPCi product recognizes a real PC compatible port with no emulation layers that can cause problems. To verify this compatibility, I attached a parallel 2 SunPCi™ Supporting Highly Available PC Applications with Solaris™ • August 1999 port ZIP drive to a SunPCi card.